It has been an iron law in American politics that, no matter what the electorate wants, our politics only has two speeds: a rush to the left and then a period of the left consolidating their gains.
There is a liberal “ratchet.”
There have been a few exceptions, but they have been minor and temporary. “Criminal justice reform” went too far, too fast, so some modest recalibration has been done–by liberals who got burned–but the 20th and 21st centuries have been a long march leftward without any serious obstacles.
Every conservative “win” has been nothing more than a temporary speed bump for the left, forcing them to retrench for the next battle. The left established new “norms” to which the conservatives must adhere, and conservatives have mainly seen their role as making what the left created work just a bit more efficiently.
The best encapsulation of this truth was when Newt Gingrich quipped that Bob Dole was nothing more than the “tax collector for the welfare state.” Conservatives conceded that we needed a technocracy; we just wanted that technocracy to work better. Socialism wasn’t so bad–it just needed better managers.
Donald Trump and MAGA have upended that line of thinking, which really disturbs the “norms” Republicans.
And I understand why, in an odd way. The opposite of adhering to norms is a bloodless revolution, which Republicans have been demanding for years. A sort of American Revolution without the shooting. As you know, the American Revolution was about creating a permanent structure that essentially preserved the “rights of Englishmen,” creating a structure that was less arbitrary, didn’t have an arbitrary king at the top, and that enshrined our rights in a structure that secured the “blessings of liberty.”
That was what distinguished the American Revolution from the French Revolution. It wasn’t about remaking the whole of society, perfecting mankind, or anything so grand. We think of it in grand terms–and should–because we took the basic ideas of John Locke and the Scottish Enlightenment and merged tradition with philosophy in a practical way.
It’s why we celebrate the Magna Carta, base our legal system on English Common Law, and think of England, not Germany, as our brother country even though, by population, Germans are our largest ancestral line, not the English. The UK as a whole has contributed more immigrants than Germany, but ask the Irish how English they feel. Our political traditions are rooted in England, with a Scottish twist. There is little that is German here, politically speaking.
The “norms” people, consciously or not, harken back to that tradition, and tradition itself is a key component of that conservatism. So they hesitate to take an axe or a hammer to even recent traditions. That is why, ironically, they prefer Hillary Clinton and even Joe Biden, the most radical president in modern history, to Donald Trump.
Trump wants to break things. He IS breaking things, and that is scary to them. Far scarier than allowing a few more notches in the leftward ratchet to be gained by the left. They may abhor the policies, but will fight to keep Tren de Aragua and MS 13 in the US because Trump is threatening “norms” by not giving each one a trial–a literal impossibility.
Trump’s populism is what scares them most. His legitimacy stems from popular sovereignty, not adherence to “norms.” He breaks norms far less than the left does, ironically, but Biden broke norms in a way they are used to. This is not really in line with how the Founders did things–they broke norms when they had to–but Biden broke the norms in the same way Wilson and Roosevelt did, and hence they see liberal radicalism as a devil they know.
Trump wants to break the ratchet, which is scary. Even I get nervous about the seeming chaos that gets unleashed at times, even though I know it is necessary. In fact, without breaking the current “norms” America is soon doomed. The Biden open borders, shocking pace at which the nation’s finances have deteriorated, and the anti-Americanism of our education system from Kindergarten to the Ph.D. level are intended to destroy America.
They say so, even.
Trump knows that no country can survive what has been done to us, and the only way to return to the vision of the Founders and to reestablish sanity is to rewrite the norms–not to move to a fundamentally different system, but to return to one based on the traditions that have been destroyed.
Harvard’s norms used to be based on the search for truth. Veritas. Now, “truth” isn’t even a consideration, but the vague and ever-changing notion of “social justice.” Science is not nothing more than a tool for advancing leftism, destroying democracy, and “decolonizing” America. Foreign aid turned out to be a money laundering operation for the left. Regulations are about destroying America’s economy. National security means censoring Americans and subsidizing gender ideology.
Trump knows that the “new normal” is just another term for allowing cancer to kill the patient. The patient needs radical surgery and chemotherapy. And the “conservatives” don’t want the side effects of the treatment.
The Trump treatments for the disease can be risky, will occasionally hurt, or even bring nausea, but they are necessary to save the patient. The alternative is national suicide.
I prefer treatment to euthanasia.
